September 16, 2005

Email with all caps in the subject bother me.

Does this mean I’m some kind of tech elitist or something? I just don’t understand what causes this to happen. I mean, you’re sitting there at your desk, and you pop open your email client, and then what? Is there a big decision to be made now? “Gee, do I press caps lock, or just type?” Or is it an automatic thing that you just do when you open an email client? What’s the story?

I’m about to write a procmail filter to throw anything with all caps in the subject line in the trash. Procmail is a cool little program that filters my email for me on the server side of things, so I don’t have to do it in every client I use, which is nice. The other nice thing is you’re not limited to the capabilities of the client in question. Some clients only let you filter based on subject contents or the “from” or “to” headers. With procmail I can say “if it comes in between 3-5pm and its from my manager, then send it to my pager, and put a copy in my inbox as well, unless it’s all caps, in which case, just throw it in the trash”. This is power. 😉